Art imitating art

December 2, 2007 — 11.00am

About one in 10 paintings on the market are not the real deal. Liz Porter meets the woman who puts suspect art under the microscope.

ROBYN SLOGGETT is the Australian art world's equivalent of a crime scene investigator. Called upon to examine a painting presented as a late 19th-century Tom Roberts, the Melbourne University art conservation expert used a microscope to identify pigment from the work's original paint — as opposed to paint added in a later repair. She then used a delicate eye surgeon's scalpel to remove a tiny speckle, less than half the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence.

Magnified 400 times and flooded with ultraviolet light, the minuscule paint fragment was able to tell Sloggett the whole story of the painting's origins. The spot of white pigment on her microscope slide was titanium dioxide — a substance that did not come on to the market until the 1920s, more than two decades after the painting had supposedly been completed. The painting, to use her cautious language, was "problematic".

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Sloggett, who is the director of the university's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, confirmed her result with Raman spectroscopy. In this less invasive but more expensive technique, a laser microscope shines infra-red beams on a painting and a printout graphs the chemical composition of each pigment on its surface.

Sloggett assesses about 20 suspect paintings a year — usually at the behest of a gallery, a dealer or a private owner, and also runs Australia's only art authentication course, attended by collectors, curators and police from Asia as well as interstate.

"About 10% of paintings on the market, both in Australia and internationally, are generally conceded to be cases of mistaken identity," she says. Suggestions of fraud may be associated with only one or two of the works she checks each year, but the legal implications are not part of her job.

"We are not concerned with the intent of someone selling a painting that may be a fake. Our question is: 'Could we place this work in the artist's body of work?' "

Originally trained as an art historian, Sloggett also studied art conservation and found that she liked "getting close to the objects".

A detailed knowledge of the work practices of individual artists is also crucial to the task of authenticating an artwork. Take, for example, a work that has been labelled as an 1890 Arthur Streeton but has been found, like the questioned Tom Roberts, to contain the more modern pigment titanium dioxide. Does this mean that it is "problematic"?

"Not necessarily," she says. It could be a later Streeton (not as valuable as an earlier Streeton, but still a Streeton).

And what if you then look at its signature under UV light — which makes old paint and varnish fluoresce and newer materials show up as dark spots — and discover that the painting has been signed over drying cracks and varnish and in different paint? This is still not proof of forgery, because Streeton was known to have added signatures to his paintings decades after he painted them.

According to a solicitor from the commercial crime section of the Office of Public Prosecutions, there have only been a handful of prosecutions for art fraud in Australia. The recent Rover Thomas case, in which Toorak couple Ivan and Pamela Liberto were jailed for forging paintings, was the first ever in Victoria.

The solicitor said that a dispute about authenticity was more likely to end up in a civil case about financial loss or defamation than in a prosecution for art fraud. One round of accusations about three artworks, for example, has sparked a defamation case that is still pending.

Sloggett was a key prosecution witness in the Thomas case, providing detailed testimony about the various materials used in the production of the suspect paintings. Sand, she told the court, had been mixed into the paint that had been applied to the canvas, in an effort to simulate the way desert dust blows on to paintings.

"We have (genuine) works by Rover Thomas where sand has been picked up in the paint. But you expect it to be blown on to the surface." In the fakes, sand had been mixed in to the paint, rather than landing on it naturally. Conte crayon had been rubbed on to the back of the works to give the effect of red dust, while dirt had been rubbed into white dots on the painting for an "aged" look.

One Melbourne family brought Sloggett a "Venetian view" painting they hoped might be the work of the Italian master Canaletto. But the expert's scanning electron microscope examination crushed any fantasies of owning a work that could bring the $US11.43 million ($A12.93 million) fetched by Canaletto's The Bucintoro at the Molo, Venice, on Ascension Day.

Million-fold magnification of blue paint on the questioned painting revealed the smaller and more uniform particles that are characteristic of artificial ultramarine, not synthesised until 1830. Canaletto, who died in 1768, used natural ultramarine. The work also had an emerald green pigment — used after 1814.

Sloggett's scanning electron microscope also detected chrome green, used after 1862, on a painting supposedly by William Constable (1776-1837).

These authenticity checks begin at $1000 for preliminary testing and rise according to the cost of the machinery involved. Use of the scanning electron microscope costs $60 an hour, while PIXE (proton induced X-ray emission) analysis — used to establish the elemental make-up of a sample — costs $2000 a day.

Sometimes a simple visual examination under ultraviolet light is enough to show up forgery. UV light revealed a "Frederick McCubbin" signature to be a later addition, and established that the date on a Streeton had been altered from 1919 to 1889. In both these cases, a simple microscope check, using a magnification of 20 times, indicated that the alterations were on top of the original varnished surface. Examination under infra-red light will also bring up other drawings (or a copyist's grid markings) under a painting.

According to Sloggett, testing usually proceeds without such dramatic CSI-style results. Examining one supposed Streeton, she looked at the adhesive on a label on the back of the painting. It was modern rubber cement, which might have been used to replace the original 1920s gum. She then studied the frame, which didn't seem to match the period of the painting, finding none of the nail holes in the canvas which would have been left if the original frame had been removed.

Her final assessment that the work was "problematic" was even more low-tech.

"I just wasn't happy with the direction of the brush strokes and how dilute the paint was," she says. "The famous UK fraudster Tom Keating (who confessed to having painted 2000 fakes, including Goyas and Rembrandts) used to write the word 'fake' under his works, and it showed up under X-ray. That would be very handy."

Faking it, not making it

■ British house painter Tom Keating was arrested for fraud in 1976 after an art expert suggested that a work by romantic landscape painter Samuel Palmer, sold at auction for £9400 ($A22,000), was a fake. Keating owned up to doing nine Samuel Palmers and claimed to have painted up to 2000 fakes, including works supposedly by Goya, Rembrandt, Constable, Sisley, Degas and Modigliani. He died a celebrity in 1984, having done both a TV series and a book, The Fake's Progress.

■ From the late 1960s, Sydney painter William Blundell openly produced thousands of works bearing the signatures of art legends such as Whiteley, Nolan, Picasso and Monet. He sold these "innuendoes", as he called them, for less than $200 to his dealer and friend Germaine Curvers. In the 1980s and early 1990s, she sold many of them through auction houses for thousands of dollars. In 1992, Curvers paid Blundell $120 for a "Brett Whiteley pastel wash nude" that she then sold at a Brisbane auction house for $3900. Many Blundell "innuendoes' ended up in well-known private and corporate collections. The Blundell saga was revealed in a 1998 court case over Curvers' estate, previously thought to be worth many millions because of the Picassos, Pollocks, Streetons and Whiteleys in her huge personal art collection.

■ In 2001, Adelaide man John Douglas O'Loughlin became the first Australian to be sentenced for indigenous art fraud, receiving a three-year bond after pleading guilty to five counts of making a misleading statement with intent to obtain financial advantage. In 1999, police were called in after experts queried dot paintings in a Sydney gallery that had been sold as the work of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. O'Loughlin, 53, told the court he was allowed to contribute to Tjapaltjarri paintings because he was given a "skin name" during a ceremonial kangaroo hunt and was therefore Tjapaltjarri's cousin.